In a move as surprising as the sudden appearance of a trident in Brick Tamland’s hands in “Anchorman,” an almost entirely different version of “Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues” is hitting theaters next Friday for one week only. Will Ferrell announced the move last night on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.”

The highly-improvised nature of the hit comedy, Ferrell explained, meant that, using different takes, the film’s editors could essentially produce a minty-fresh new cut. Only this time it’s rated R.

“They’re doing something they’ve never done before,” Ferrell told Fallon. “For one week only, Feb. 28th, we have a brand new version with 753 [sic, actually 763] jokes, brand new jokes. Originally, the movie was four hours long, and they played around with the idea of splitting it into two movies. But that didn’t really work, so we just had a second editor working the whole time with alternative jokes. It’s the same movie, it’s 20 minutes longer, there’s a musical number we had to cut from the original one, little treats like that.”

Added writer-director Adam McKay in a press release, “When my editor told me we had a whole different version of the movie that was more than two hours long with nearly 800 new jokes, I was shocked. But when Paramount said they were actually going to put it in theaters, I did a 1950’s spit take. If you’re a hard-core ‘Anchorman’ fan go see this. If you’re not, stay very far away.”

The follow-up to the 2004 cult classic, “Anchorman 2” disappointed many (hence its mediocre 61 score on Metacritic) but has already earned more than $170 million at the global box office. It’s pretty much played-out domestically. A one-week run won’t add a lot to the bottom line, but it’ll do a lot to juice interest in the DVD release, slated for April 1.

Though filmmakers used to commonly shoot sanitized versions of R-rated movies for later airing on TV, no one in Hollywood could think of an exact precedent for the new Ron Burgundy epic, officially called “Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues: Super-Sized R-Rated Version.” Still, on Feb. 28 it opens against another theatrically-recycled product: “Son of God,” which is essentially a segment taken from last year’s hit TV miniseries “The Bible.”